The coffee was excellent and so was the cigar which Sir Philip offered him. Ashley sat back in the brocaded armchair taking stock of the people in the room. Sir Philip Rivers he knew, a short, stocky man with a military moustache and, as if to soften his appearance, laughter lines round his eyes. Lady Rivers, still a very handsome woman with a kindly expression and that lovely smile. Sharp, too, if he knew anything about it. Captain Rivers, their son Gregory, who was now leaning with one elbow on the mantelpiece talking to Major Haldean, he had, of course, interviewed earlier. He had his father’s stockiness and sandy hair but was a taller man with a frank, open face. Trustworthy, said Ashley to himself. Then there was their daughter, Isabelle.
Ashley quietly drew his breath in. He had heard she was a beauty and, by jingo, she was. Chestnut hair with a gleam of red where it was touched by the evening sun and vivid green eyes. I bet she plays merry hell up in London, thought Ashley. It’s not just her looks, or her dress, a modern, square-necked, flat-chested thing, which would have made some women look as if they’d dressed in a sack, but which Miss Rivers carried off perfectly. It wasn’t any of those things, it was that air she had about her. Why, you’d hardly notice any other girl . . . With a shock he realized he had hardly noticed the other girl in the room.
Marguerite Vayle, she’d been introduced as. Goodness knows where she fitted in and by the look on her face she didn’t want to fit in. A poor little dab of a thing with mousy hair who looked as if she’d dressed any old how. A schoolgirl? No, too old for that, but not by much. Sulky or worried? With a faint question mark in his mind, Ashley flicked his gaze to the man at the fireplace.
Major Haldean. Surrounded, as he was, by the unmistakably English faces around him, he stood out like an orange in a basket of apples. And yet his speech and his name were English enough, belied by his foreign darkness of hair and eyes. Those eyes suggested humour and friendliness but the chief impression he gave was of a nervous intelligence. And Ashley couldn’t rid himself of the idea he should know something about him. What, for heaven’s sake? Major Haldean; despite the title he was a young man – Ashley had long since ceased to be surprised by the youth of commissioned officers who had served in the war – and Ashley also knew from his statement that he’d been a pilot in the RFC. He walked with a slight limp. An air accident? An air ace? No, that wasn’t right. And why did the feeling chime in with the tugging memory of the last cup of tea before bedtime, a good book and the pleasant drowsy feeling that sleep was on its way? Why . . .? Got it!
Ashley looked at Major Haldean with triumph. Jack Haldean, that’s who it was. The author, of course, and damn clever stories they were, too. Interesting, as well, as if the murders and what-have-you were happening to real people and not just people in a detective story. And that wasn’t all. Hadn’t he heard that some detective story writer had been involved behind the scenes with a real case up in London? It wasn’t generally known or the newspapers would have made a meal of it, but Ashley had heard as much at a police dinner. He was sure the name was Haldean.
‘Major Haldean,’ he asked. ‘I don’t suppose you write books, do you?’
Haldean gave a smile in which shyness was once again uppermost. ‘Books and short stories, yes. It’s mainly short stories, but some of those have been collected into books. Er . . . Have you come across them?’
‘I have indeed,’ said Ashley enthusiastically. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed them. I’ll tell you something else, too, sir. You managed to get the police more or less right, which is a thing that most detective stories never seem to bother about.’
Haldean laughed. ‘That’s my pal Rackham for you. Inspector Rackham of Scotland Yard. He tells me where I’m going wrong. The trouble is, you can’t get it completely right, otherwise it doesn’t work as a story.’ He paused, and Ashley heard the unspoken question. ‘The thing about stories is that the police are happy to welcome an amateur. I don’t know if they always would in real life.’
Ashley stroked his chin. ‘I suppose it depends who the amateur is.’ He was probing now. ‘Didn’t you get involved with a case yourself?’
Gregory Rivers grinned. ‘Your secret’s out, Jack.’ He looked at Ashley. ‘If you know about that, Superintendent, I wish you’d tell us. We can’t get a thing out of this human oyster apart from the fact it happened.’
‘It was confidential,’ muttered Haldean.
‘So you tell us,’ retorted Rivers. He shot a sideways glance at Haldean. ‘However, I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences when I tell you old Jack’s just dying to have a crack at working out what went on this afternoon.’
The ball was firmly at Ashley’s feet. ‘I’ve got your statement, of course, Major,’ he began cautiously, then caught the eager, rather anxious expression on Haldean’s face. He gave the ball a careful nudge. ‘What do you think about the murder, then? After all, you were an eyewitness.’
Haldean raised an eyebrow. ‘So it was murder. I wondered if it was.’
‘Murder?’ echoed Lady Rivers. ‘But how can it have been? Are you sure?’
Ashley nodded his head, taking in the reactions of the people in the room. Interest – curiosity – and then he realized that Marguerite Vayle was looking at him intensely. Fear? Maybe. However, she was only a bit of a kid . . .
Sir Philip stared at him. ‘Murder? Damn me.’ He glanced at his son. ‘You said nothing about the feller being murdered. How can he have been murdered?’
‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it,’ said Ashley. ‘He was shot through the head, you see, and we can’t find the gun anywhere. Believe me, we looked for it. I’d like to see the gun, I must say. It can only be a tiny thing. The bullet hole was very small and there obviously wasn’t much wallop behind it. There was no exit wound.’
Haldean nodded knowledgeably. ‘That’ll be a .22. They can be very nasty weapons. The bullet lacks the force to get out of the other side of the head and ricochets around inside the skull. It does an awful lot of damage.’
‘Jack!’ said his aunt with a warning glance at Marguerite. ‘Please don’t. You’ll give us all nightmares.’
‘No he won’t,’ said Isabelle cheerfully, taking Marguerite’s hand. ‘We’re all as tough as old boots nowadays and, after all, it’s not as if we knew him, is it? You’re all right, aren’t you, Maggie?’
‘I . . . I . . .’ began Marguerite Vayle, then stopped. ‘Yes, of course it’s all right. Aunt Alice, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go to my room now.’
‘Just as you like, dear,’ agreed Lady Rivers.
The door shut behind her and Isabelle looked at her mother in exasperation. ‘Honestly, she’s so wet! The slightest thing brings on the heebie-jeebies.’
‘I think it shows very proper feeling,’ said Sir Philip.
‘Oh, Dad, it doesn’t. If Mr Lawrence isn’t clucking over her like a mother hen when the slightest bit of a thing goes wrong, she goes running up to her room. I can’t think why you have her to stay.’
‘I think you’re being too harsh, Isabelle,’ said her mother. ‘You know perfectly well why poor Marguerite’s here and it’s only natural that a girl of her age shouldn’t want to listen to a catalogue of horrors. We’re talking about murder, which isn’t the slightest bit of a thing, as you put it. Jack, you should be more careful. Bullets and skulls are all very well in your stories, but I don’t see why we have to talk about them.’
‘I don’t mind talking about them,’ muttered Isabelle rebelliously, ‘and I don’t see why Maggie should. She’s only a couple of years younger than I am.’
‘But you really are like an old boot,’ said her brother.
She gave him a charming smile. ‘Thank you, Greg. How beautifully put.’
‘Actually,’ said Haldean, ‘I was surprised how upset you were about Boscombe popping off this afternoon, though, Isabelle. After all, as you said, you didn’t know him.’
‘I’m not so hard-bitten that I can’t whack up a bit of sympathy for the poor soul. It was ba
d enough when I thought he’d just died, what with having Mrs Griffin to cope with, but murder . . .’ She stopped and shuddered. ‘It’s awful to think that while we were all enjoying ourselves and thinking of ordinary, everyday things, someone was planning that. They’d be all smiling on top and underneath . . .’ She shook herself. ‘And what makes it worse is that you were there. Right outside the tent, I mean.’
Greg nodded. ‘It’s rotten, isn’t it?’ He glanced at Ashley. ‘But that’s the point, Superintendent. We were there all the time. It can’t have been murder. Jack and I and Mrs Griffin saw Boscombe go into the fortune teller’s tent and not another soul went in after him.’ He sighed uneasily. ‘We were talking – joking, I suppose – about him being bumped off. It sounds dreadful now, but he was pretty drunk and very offensive. I can’t believe he was murdered. Are you quite sure it wasn’t suicide?’
Ashley knocked the ash off his cigar and sat forward. ‘Perfectly sure, Captain Rivers. Not only could we not find the gun, but there were no powder or burn marks on Boscombe’s skin either, which you usually get with a suicide –’
‘If the gun’s an automatic then there might not be anyway,’ interrupted Haldean. ‘They’ve got smokeless powder in them so you often don’t get the burning you do with a revolver. I got it wrong in a story I did last year and received a very learned telling-off from a bloke at the Home Office.’
‘Trust you to know that,’ said Greg with a grin. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ashley, what were you saying?’
Ashley coughed. ‘I wouldn’t take anyone’s opinion about firearms marks as gospel. It always seems to depend on whom you ask.’ He put down his coffee cup thoughtfully. ‘As for you not seeing anyone go into the tent, Captain Rivers, there’s no great mystery about that. After all a tent isn’t like a house or even a hut. The canvas walls are laced together and what I think must have happened is that someone pulled apart the lacing and shot him through the hole.’
Haldean frowned, visualizing the scene that afternoon. ‘You could get under the wall of the tent quite easily, you know. Especially if you pulled out a tent peg or loosened a guy rope. Anyone who’s reasonably active could wriggle underneath.’
‘They could,’ agreed Ashley. ‘They’d have to be quick, though, and there’s the risk they’d be spotted. I think someone saw Mr Boscombe go in and took a shot through the tent walls. They can’t have done it from the back of the booth because of the angle of the bullet.’
‘Isn’t that awfully chancy?’ asked Haldean, filling his pipe. ‘I mean, with Greg and me standing round the corner?’
Ashley shrugged. ‘A murderer’s got to take some chances, otherwise they couldn’t do it at all. And really, what would you see? A man peering into a tent. The gun would be concealed by his body and the odds are you wouldn’t remember it especially. What I can’t understand is why you didn’t hear anything.’
Haldean laughed. ‘Hear anything? In that racket? You don’t know what you’re asking. The place was like Bedlam. There were children shrieking on the swings, the rifle range cracking away, people shouting through megaphones, a band thumping out selections from Jerome Kern and what sounded like a heavy artillery barrage from the trap-shooting. If someone had decided to take a machine gun to Boscombe then a faint susurration of sound might have reached us, but a .22? Absolutely not.’
‘Nevertheless,’ persisted Ashley, ‘I think the murderer was taking a pretty big risk. Are you sure you didn’t hear the crack of a shot while you were standing outside?’
‘Not a thing. Greg? How about you?’
Rivers shook his head regretfully. ‘I only wish I had,’ he said. ‘To think of us standing there chatting while the man was murdered . . . I mean, it makes you feel a bit feeble, doesn’t it? I actually looked in the tent and saw Boscombe.’
‘You said he looked “dead to the world”, as I remember. And I, God help me, felt pleased about it because it meant he was out of our hair for the time being. As I mentioned in my statement, Mr Ashley, Boscombe had been an unmitigated pest that afternoon and I’d tried to avoid him. But . . .’ He paused. He wanted to phrase this correctly. Greg was quite right. He was itching to be involved with the case, and although the Superintendent seemed friendly enough, he might freeze up if he thought he was being pumped. ‘You said you didn’t find the gun. Did you – er – find anything significant?’ Ashley frowned slightly and Haldean hurried on. ‘The trouble was that I, detective story writer or not’ (it wouldn’t hurt to remind him of this admittedly thin reason for being taken into his confidence) ‘was, considered as an eyewitness, about as much use as a chocolate fire-screen.’ That made him laugh. Haldean had hoped it would. ‘I did manage to keep everyone out of the tent.’
‘And believe me, Major Haldean, I appreciated that.’
Haldean gave him a quick smile. ‘Thanks. Mrs Verrity was a great help where that was concerned. But I had my hands full with Mrs Griffin and a little girl who had taken a shine to me.’ He nodded to Isabelle. ‘Belle helped of course, and so did Greg, but it did mean I couldn’t have a dekko on my own account.’
Ashley returned the smile. ‘The little girl – is that Sally Mills of 17, Landsdown Cottages?’ Haldean nodded. ‘The thing she was chiefly concerned about was that she’d got a new doll to replace the one she’d lost. I gather you provided that for her.’
‘Absolutely, I did. It was the only way to keep her quiet. After the doctor and the police arrived I took little Sally off to get a doll and my cousins took Mrs Griffin to the tea tent.’ Was the Superintendent going to count him in?
‘She told us that she’d had an awful foreboding all day that something was going to go wrong,’ said Isabelle. ‘She was unnecessarily graphic about it. “I had a feeling in my water,” was how she put it. Poor Greg had to look the other way.’
‘Well, honestly, Isabelle,’ put in Rivers. ‘It was a bit rich, wasn’t it?’
‘She calmed down after a gallon or so of tea. She had shrieking hysterics when it turned out he’d shot himself, as we thought. Thank goodness Mrs Verrity kept her head. I wouldn’t be surprised if she broke down later on because she was marvellously controlled at the time.’
‘She gave her statement very clearly,’ said Ashley. ‘You asked about physical evidence, Major.’ Haldean gave a silent breath of relief and tried not to look too pleased with himself. ‘There wasn’t much. The ground was baked hard so there weren’t any footprints. What we found was a collection of negatives. No gun, nothing disturbed, nothing dropped at the scene, and as to the outside of the tent it was the same story. As far as I could tell, no one had taken out a tent peg or fiddled about with the guy ropes or, if they did, they replaced them very carefully. It wouldn’t take much, though, to loosen the fastenings of the tent walls. I tried it on the other side of the tent and it would have been easy enough to poke a gun barrel through and make it look untouched afterwards, but that rough canvas is useless for fingerprints, so there’s not help there.’ He finished the last of his coffee and looked at Haldean with the beginnings of a wry smile. ‘It seems a simple murder but as I remember reading in one of your stories, they’re the most difficult to solve. It’ll be a case of . . .’ He broke off as the door opened.
Haldean swore under his breath. It was one thing having got the Superintendent to spill the beans to them. It was quite another now a stranger had entered the room. He liked Mr Lawrence but he could wish the man had timed his entrance better.
‘Rivers?’ began Mr Lawrence, then broke off as he saw Ashley. ‘I’m sorry,’ he continued as Ashley got to his feet. ‘I didn’t realize you had a visitor.’
‘Not at all, my dear fellow,’ said Sir Philip quickly. ‘Come on in. Superintendent Ashley, this is Mr Hugh Lawrence from Canada. He’s staying with us for a few days. This is Mr Ashley of the Sussex police, Lawrence. He’s looking into this affair at the Breedenbrook fête this afternoon.’
‘A most unpleasant occurrence, Superintendent,’ said Lawrence gravely. He was a squarely built m
an about the same age as Sir Philip, with an attractive, mobile face that showed, at the moment, nothing but deep concern. ‘I regret to say I knew nothing of it until I went to the car for the homeward journey and then the chauffeur told me what had happened. I was glad I was able to break the news to Miss Vayle. She’s a sensitive girl and was upset at the thought of a man dying and even more so when the chauffeur told us he had shot himself.’
‘He didn’t,’ said Isabelle quickly. ‘It was murder.’
Lawrence raised his eyebrows and looked around the room. ‘Where’s Miss Vayle now? Does she know?’
‘She went to her room when we started talking about it. She didn’t want to hear the gory details.’
‘That shows very proper feeling,’ said Mr Lawrence approvingly. He sat down in an armchair as if settling himself for the evening.
Haldean decided to take the initiative. ‘Er . . . would you care for a pipe on the terrace, Superintendent? As I said, I was Boscombe’s CO during the war. I might be able to fill you in with a few more details about him.’ Would that fetch him?
Ashley got to his feet. ‘That might be very helpful, sir. Thank you.’
It had worked.
The terrace looked out on to the sweep of the park. Haldean propped his elbows against the stone balustrade and gazed at the dusky landscape. There was still just enough light to see the line of trees edging the river but the stars were beginning to come out and a faint gleam over the eastern horizon showed where the moon was rising. It was a rich night and Haldean felt a sudden stab of sympathy that Boscombe, much as he disliked him, had been so forcibly prevented from enjoying it. He drew a deep breath and turned to the man beside him. ‘So Boscombe was murdered, Mr Ashley? To be honest, I can’t say I’m surprised, you know. Granted that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead and so on, he was a little brute when I knew him and I don’t think he’d improved. But as to who murdered him and how – well, that’s another matter, isn’t it?’
There was a stone bench with a lion’s head at the end of the terrace. Ashley sat down and snuggled himself into the angle between the back of the seat and the carved lion’s body which served as the arm. ‘Those are the questions, aren’t they?’ he said, taking out his pipe and tobacco pouch. ‘The who and the why. Talking of “who”, who’s Mr Lawrence?’
A Fête Worse Than Death Page 3
